All posts tagged driving in Iceland

Occasionally my family, or lately just my parents and I, will get in the car and go for a drive. Sometimes we go somewhere specific, but we also like to casually explore an area. This usually takes the form of driving along the highway and going down likely side-roads to see where they lead.

Around mid-August we went on one such exploration, on which one side road yielded something unexpected: tourists in trouble. Icelanders like to say that tourists are always getting into trouble in their rental cars because they have no experience driving in Icelandic conditions and therefore underestimate the potential for getting into scrapes. (The truth is that Icelanders get into similar scrapes, even people with years of driving experience in the country. We just don’t talk about it).

On this particular occasion I think the guy was just unlucky, as evidenced by the fact that he got stuck on the way back, not the way down, and that just after we pulled the car out of the sand trap, three more cars, none of them 4WD vehicles, made it across the sand trap with no problem at all.

These people only spoke Spanish, a language none of us speaks (I know how to order beer, but that’s about it), but it’s amazing how far you can get with gestures and international vocabulary.

Here is a photo of the rescue operation:

Here’s a second photo of the car, showing the kind of road we were on: